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Obama on Iran, Boehner on Obamacare, George Will on the Sunshine State: PolitiFact Oregon Roundup

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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, claimed recently that the Affordable Care Act will "destroy" 2.3 million jobs. His is one of five assertions that goes under the microscope in today's PolitiFact Oregon Roundup.
(J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

Given the prominence of the job, it’s only fitting that the president of the United States gets his facts checked more often than anyone else. President Obama, as we noted last week, has been fact-checked more than 500 times in the six years since PolitiFact’s founding. That’s more than double anyone else.

The president makes PolitiFact Oregon’s Roundup again today, both for what he said and for what others have to say about him. For good measure, we include a couple of assertions from conservative pundit George Will, who has not made the roundup for far too long now.

In his State of the Union address last month, the president said he won’t wait for Congress to move on some key priorities. “I’ve got a pen and a phone,” has taken to saying, meaning he is willing to sign executive orders to control what he can. An email resurfaced not long afterward, which claimed Obama has issues more than 1,000 executive orders so far in his presidency.

The story, by Steve Contorno, found that number to be absurdly high and wrong in nearly everything it said. The number of executive orders Obama has issued as of Jan. 20, 2014 was 168. As for the 14 executive orders the chain email claimed came from Obama’s red-hot pen? They came from Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Ford. Almost all of them have been revoked. The claim was rated Pants on Fire.

The Fact Checker, written by Washington Post veteran Glenn Kessler, looked at another State of the Union claim, where Obama said “unprecedented inspections will help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.”

Kessler found that the matter is open to some interpretation, but that the president and his staff would be wise to avoid the use of such claims as “unprecedented.” He wavered between One and Two Pinocchios (with four being the most untruthful), but settled on Two. “It may not involve factual error,” he wrote, “but, as our rating scale says, ‘a politician can create a misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.”

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, joined many Republicans in seizing on a recent Congressional Budget Office report that looked at, among other things, the Affordable Care Act. PolitiFact writer Louis Jacobson found that Boehner, like many others, overlooked the difference between workers and jobs, and Boehner was misleading when he used the word “destroyed.”

“The reduction will come from voluntary actions by workers, rather than layoffs by employers,” the story concluded. Boehner’s claim was rated Mostly False.

Will, in a recent column, focused on the closely watched special election to fill the seat of the late U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young

PolitiFact writer Katie Sanders had to scrounge to find the numbers needed to dispute Will’s findings. But she determined that Will’s error came from using countywide numbers instead of the votes cast in this particular congressional district – which doesn’t conform strictly to county lines.

“Will wrote that Obama carried the 13th Congressional District by 8.2 points in 2008 and 5.6 points in 2012,” Sanders concluded. “He was using countywide election returns. Using returns from the actual congressional district show a much smaller margin of victory for Obama in both presidential elections. Obama carried the district by about 4 points in 2008 and about 1.5 points in 2012. We rate Will’s statement false.

5. George Will says, ‘Any Floridian who has ever required an absentee ballot henceforth gets one automatically”

Will was lamenting the waning influence of Election Day in a recent column, which also looked at the race to succeed the late C.W. Bill Young. In doing so, he claimed that once someone in Florida requested an absentee ballot, they would forever after have one mailed to them prior to election day.

Sanders’ story, relying on testimony from Florida elections officials, found that wasn’t the case. One request for an absentee ballot will get one sent to you for the subsequent two elections. After that, the request is considered cancelled unless renewed. She rated his claim False.

This particular roundup, obviously, wasn’t a great one for Will. Thoughts on today’s offering? Suggestions for future ones? Let us know and we’ll get right on it.